Spis punktów szlaku

The “A” housing estate

The first settlement of New Tychy.

Design of the housing estate (urban planning and architecture) - Tadeusz Teodorowicz-Todorowski with his team, 1951.

On 4th October 1950, the Government Executives passed a resolution on development of Tychy. The task of designing the first housing estate was handed to Tadeusz Teodorowicz-Todorowski, a professor at the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice. The design was ready by the end of March 1951; the construction began still in the same year. The first flat was completed in 1952. The entire estate is built in traditional technology from bricks. It was designed on an axial plan, as a compact complex with a central square with representative, commercial and service functions. A complete social infrastructure was designed and implemented (two elementary schools, two kindergartens, a nursery school, a community centre, a clinic, shops on the ground floors of residential buildings).

This is the only estate in Tychy, where program assumptions of the art of socialist realism were fully implemented in urban planning and architecture. This is where we will find a historicizing architectural details (cornice mouldings, pilaster-strips, rose windows, rustication, attics, pillars, arcades) and rich sculptural decoration: reliefs on the façade of the community centre and above entrances to the kindergartens and schools, zoomorphic plaques above the entrances to the staircases (there are about 50 of those). In addition, four full-body sculptures were placed in the area and seven sgraffito compositions were created. Two sgraffiti (the composition with the name of the estate and the figural scene with workers) welcome people walking from the railway station.

Construction of the estate was completed in 1956. In the 1960s it was named a “mining estate” and a monument of the mining lamp was raised at its eastern end, at the square by the end of the street. Until 1989, the main square and the inner street, representing the axis of the housing estate (running from east to west), bore the name of Wincenty Pstrowski to commemorate the famous miner and udarnik.